International
Zurich Film Festival’s New World View: India
MUMBAI: For its tenth edition, the Zurich Film Festival (ZFF) welcomes India as its New World View section guest for the film festival held this year between 25 September and 5 October. In doing so, ZFF highlights a country with a tradition spanning more than 100 years of cinematic history and a production output.
In explaining the decision to choose India, the co-directors of ZFF, Nadja Schildknecht and Karl Spoerri said in the official statement, “New Indian cinema has experienced an upsurge in recent years, and not just on the subcontinent.” It is among young filmmakers that the change is most visible. The festival-directors go on to say, “New projects have been realised over the past few years that undermine common stereotypes. The movement from mainstream to independent cinema is unmistakable. This development is incredibly exciting.”
Even the large festivals such as Cannes have discovered the potential of Indian cinema for themselves. There has not been a line-up in recent years that did not include an Indian film. Schildknecht and Spoerri are certain for this reason that “focussing on India can only serve to enrich the 10th ZFF.” M.K. Lokesh, the Ambassador of India to Switzerland, is delighted by the festival’s choice: “Over the years, the Indian film industry has achieved a very high level of technical standards and directional skills. In the Indo-Swiss context, the Indian cinema, by capturing the natural beauty of Switzerland in many films, contributed to Swiss popularity among Indian tourists. It is befitting that the Zurich Film Festival is showcasing India as the guest country this year.”
Indeed, Indian festival entries are usually and rightfully praised for their thematic freshness and high cinematic quality. The best examples of these attributes include Vasan Balas’ promising debut Peddlers, a captivating relationship drama in the form of a thriller; the romantic comedy The Lunchbox by newcomer Ritesh Batra, and the family/gangster saga Gangs of Wasseypur, Anurag Kashyap’s Indian Godfather, with a budget of $ 45 million, the most expensive non-Bollywood production to date.
It was not only with the launching of The Lunchbox in 2013 that ZFF reacted early to the subcontinent’s cinematic signals; guest in Zurich and highly successful producer Guneet Monga (The Lunchbox, The Gangs of Wasseypur and Peddlers) also offered a preview of things to come during her ZFF Master Class. Bollywood bastion Yash Raj Films hired Guneet Monga for the international sales and distribution of the adolescent drama Titli – an indication that the traditional Indian film scene is giving independent domestic cinema a commercial chance.
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The programme of this year’s New World View section will showcase ten new feature and documentary films by emerging Indian filmmakers and a short film block. The short film block is selected through our collaboration with the Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur. Details of the programme will be released at a later date.
LOS ANGELES: Acting has never been an easy profession, but in recent years, it has acquired a new existential anxiety. Artificial intelligence can now mimic faces, clone voices and, in theory at least, speak any language it is fed. The fear that actors may soon be replaced by algorithms no longer belongs exclusively to science fiction. And yet, despite the rise of digital inauthenticity, some performers remain stubbornly resistant to replacement. The reason is not celebrity, nor even talent. It is language.
On paper, this should not be a problem. AI can translate. It can imitate accents. It can string together grammatically correct sentences in dozens of languages. But acting, inconveniently, is not about grammatical correctness. It is about meaning, and meaning is where AI still falters.
Machine translation offers a cautionary tale. Google Translate, now powered by neural AI, has improved markedly since its debut in 2006. It can manage menus, emails and airport signage with impressive efficiency. What it struggles with, however, are the moments that matter most: idioms, metaphors, irony, and cultural shorthand. Ask it to translate a joke, a threat disguised as politeness, or a line heavy with emotional subtext, and it begins to unravel. Acting lives precisely in those gaps.
This matters because film language is rarely literal. Scripts, particularly in independent cinema, rely on figurative speech and symbolism to convey what characters cannot say outright. Pedro Almodóvar’s Volver is a useful example. The film’s recurring use of red operates on multiple levels: grief, desire, repression, liberation, and memory. These meanings are inseparable from the Spanish cultural context and emotional cadence. A translation may convey the words, but not the weight they carry. An AI-generated performance might replicate the sound, but not the sense.
This is where multilingual actors gain their edge. Performers such as Penélope Cruz and Sofía Vergara do not simply switch between languages; they move between cultural logics. Their fluency allows them to inhabit characters without flattening them for international consumption. Language, for them, is not an accessory but a structuring force.
Beyond European cinema, this becomes even more pronounced. Languages such as Hindi, Arabic and Mandarin are spoken by hundreds of millions of people and underpin vast cinematic traditions. As global audiences grow more interconnected, the demand for authenticity increases rather than diminishes. Viewers can tell when a performance has been filtered through approximation. Subtle errors, misplaced emphasis, and an unnatural rhythm break the illusion.
There is also a practical dimension. Multilingualism expands opportunity. Sofía Vergara has spoken openly about how learning English enabled her to work beyond Colombia and access Hollywood roles. But this movement is not a one-way export of talent into English-speaking cinema. Multilingual actors carry stories, styles and sensibilities back with them, enriching multiple industries at once.
Cinema has always thrived on such hybridity. Denzel Washington’s performances, for instance, draw on the cultural realities of growing up African American in the United States, while also reflecting stylistic influences from classic Hollywood and Westerns. His work demonstrates how identity and influence intersect on screen. Multilingual actors extend this intersection further, embodying multiple cultural frameworks simultaneously.
At times, linguistic authenticity is not merely artistic but ethical. Films that confront historical trauma, such as Schindler’s List, rely on language to anchor their moral seriousness. When Jewish actors perform in German, the choice is not incidental. Language becomes a site of memory and confrontation. It is difficult to imagine an automated voice carrying that responsibility without hollowing it out.
This is why claims that AI heralds the death of language miss the point. Language is not just a delivery system for information. It is a repository of history, humour, power and pain. Fluency is not only about knowing what to say, but when to hesitate, when to understate, and when to let silence do the work. These are not technical problems waiting to be solved; they are human instincts shaped by lived experience.
AI may one day improve its grasp of metaphor and nuance. It may even learn to sound convincing. But acting is not about sounding convincing; it is about being convincing. Until algorithms can acquire memory, cultural inheritance and emotional intuition, multilingual actors will remain irreplaceable. AI may learn to speak. But it cannot yet learn to mean.
In an industry increasingly tempted by shortcuts, language remains stubbornly resistant to automation. And for actors who can move between worlds, linguistic, cultural, and emotional, that resistance is not a weakness, but a quiet, enduring advantage.
